This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present disclosure, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
Various types of data may be organized and stored in databases that are created, stored, and maintained on different types of computer-based systems. Examples of such databases include relational databases, which are well known and have been in use since the year 2000. Such databases may be used to store data ranging from personal information to data developed in large-scale industrial, commercial, and governmental contexts. Thus, such stored data sets may range from the trivially small in size to those that may encompass tens millions of records and data points, or more. As the number of records and the number of defined fields within a database grow in number however, the limitations of a given database architecture may impact the capability of a given database to be used efficiently.
By way of example, data stored in a database may be structured as interconnected logical classes corresponding to different types or sets of data. Such a model may be referred to as a tree or data tree, with each logical class corresponding to a different node of the tree. Each node in the tree data structure may be identified by a corresponding discriminator, which may generally correspond to a class name or identifier describing or characterizing that node. While it is fairly straightforward to reference terminal nodes of the data tree in a query, it may require more complex queries to properly reference non-terminal portions of the tree, which may encompass any number of related or sub-nodes. This complexity may reduce performance of the database with respect to queries or other operations performed on the database.